To the philosopher Rivka Weinberg, we need to think about the moral permissibility of procreation in terms of risk. In her book The Risk of a Lifetime: How, When, and Why Procreation May Be Permissible (2015), she presents a conservative position on the ethics of procreation, deviating from both the strong antinatalist position which says…
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Julius Bahnsen (1830 – 1881) was a German philosopher and disciple of Arthur Schopenhauer. The historian Frederick C. Beiser, in his book Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860–1900, describes Bahnsen’s philosophical views, along with other key German pessimistic philosophers and followers of Schopenhauer, such as Julius Frauenstädt, Eduard von Hartmann, and Philipp Mainländer. Weltschmerz is…
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Digital antinatalism is the philosophical view that it is morally wrong to create sentient artificial intelligence (AI). It is a variant of antinatalism, which promotes the view that we should refrain from procreating for moral reasons. We can consider digital antinatalism to be a selective – or weaker – form of antinatalism since one may…
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The psychology of philosophy is a relatively new field. It refers to the relationship between psychological traits and philosophical beliefs. This field garnered significant attention recently with the publication of a new study from the psychologist David B. Yaden and the philosopher Derek E. Anderson. Published in the journal Philosophical Psychology, this study asked 314…
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It is fair to say that much of antinatalist thought is underpinned by a rejectionist philosophy, a nay-saying attitude towards life, a pessimism about the state of human life and the world at large. The line between such pessimism and antinatalism seems logical: if you believe existence is – overall – a bad deal, an…
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